Plate 45.—Head of the Lemnian Athena.
Alinari.
shield. The first charge he could answer, because Pericles had warned him to make all the gold detachable so that it could be weighed. The latter bears a family resemblance to the whole class of sacristan’s tales which attach to every artistic monument in Europe. There was, and there is, on the shield an old man’s head which looks so realistic that it might be a portrait. Near him there is a warrior with his arm across his face, and that is said to have been the artist’s device for concealing from common view a speaking likeness of Pericles. Nevertheless Pheidias was condemned by the angry people, as Aristophanes, his contemporary, tells us:
“Pheidias began the mischief, he was first to come to grief.”
Few other details of the sculptor’s life are worth repeating. Many are given, but their contradictions involve us in hopeless difficulties. Neither portraits nor biographies belong to the fifth century, so wholly was the individual merged in the community. Later centuries had to provide them, and invent them.
The number of works credibly assigned to Pheidias amounts to twenty-four. He was specially famed for his divine statues. He was able to practise for his chryselephantine work on what is termed an acrolithic image—that is, of gilt wood and marble—for little Platæa. He worked also in bronze. At Olympia he made a statue of the boy victor Pantarkes, whom he loved. For the Athenian Acropolis he made two other statues of Athena, one the colossal bronze figure which faced the visitor as he passed through the Propylæa on to the sacred citadel. Her spear was visible above the roofs to the sailors at sea, and it is so represented on the coins of the city. It was a work of his early years, executed for Kimon. It was removed to Constantinople, and the historian Nicetas tells us of its destruction by a drunken mob in A.D. 1203. There was also the Lemnian Athena,[53] dedicated by the colonists of that island about 450 B.C. Here she was represented in a peaceful aspect without her helmet, “with a blush upon her cheek instead of a helmet to veil her beauty.” The beautiful statue which Furtwängler has compiled by setting a head from Bologna[54] upon a body at Dresden forms a brilliant and to my mind triumphant reproduction of this statue. Of course it is only a copy. If it be true that Pheidias made dedicatory offerings for the Athenians at Delphi immediately after the Persian wars he must have had an artistic career of fifty years. In that time he had brought the art of sculpture from infancy to the prime of manhood.